


Small Victories

by Glinda



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Espionage, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-04
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 08:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1892919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glinda/pseuds/Glinda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Saving the world is easy, making friends is hard.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Victories

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> Many thanks to significantowl for kicking my commas and apostraphes into submission.
> 
> Flipflopdiva asked for Steve & Natasha during and post-movie, and I was thinking about an interview that Scarlett Johanson did about the film, she talked about Natasha learning to have a real friend during the course of the film, but also referring to her little arrow necklace as an acknowledgement of her relationship with Barton. So I wanted to explore Natasha learning to be friends with Steve but also coming to terms with the notion that she does have friends and that that’s a strength not a weakness. So you also get Natasha & Sam friendship, Natasha & Clint friendship and Natasha and Fury friendship on the side – I wanted to fit in some Natasha and Hill friendship too but that’s another story.

Natasha’s surprised, after everything that happened in New York, to find herself assigned to essentially be Captain America’s minder. She half expects the job to go to Barton, maybe thinks that he needs someone like Rogers to work with. She’d done her best for him in the aftermath but now that he’s levelled out he needs things she can’t give him. (She can help with the guilt and the flashbacks, the screaming nightmares are old friends to her, but the raw grief of his best friend’s death is something she can’t begin to touch.) Coulson was his anchor for a long time, but he’s dead now, and Natasha can see all the ways Rogers' shadow had shaped their handler. She expects to work with Banner, to have to face her fears and learn to trust the Hulk. The first time Hulk makes an unexpected and unwanted appearance in a confined space, it's Barton who steps up, takes a bow and arrow and some sedative and brings him down. After that, it may be Stark that Banner lives with, but any time he goes AWOL it's Barton that brings him home. Fury is unsurprised but unmistakably pleased, so she trusts he knows what he’s doing and throws herself into her own assignment in Washington. Doubtless all will become clear sooner or later. 

It never occurs to her that Fury might be proud of them, that this might be his way of being kind to them, the only way he knows how. 

It takes her a while to figure out, but she watches how other people respond to their Captain Rogers and she understands. The vast majority of people in SHIELD have grown up with the idea of Captain America, and almost unconsciously, they believe in him, as an icon, as an ideal, as the living, breathing embodiment of everything they fight for. That’s a hell of a weight to put on the shoulders of a human being, regardless of the super-strength in them. She has none of that baggage. As in so many things, she does what other people can’t. In this case that means winding him up, teasing him, sparring with him, a thousand little things that remind him that he’s just a colleague to her, another human being. They run missions together, making a good team with the potential to be a great team if she can just figure out what it is that is missing, something that keeps undermining whatever progress they make. Their skills are complementary, they should be an excellent team, but the keep grinding up against the places where they should fit and neither she nor Fury can quite figure out where she’s going wrong. Increasingly she thinks he needs something she can’t give him, so she sets out to figure out what it is, which is why she ends up trying to set him up. She’s not entirely serious in her attempts, but she wonders if he’s the type of man who struggles to confide in other men but can open up to a girlfriend. It’s another way to tease him, to figure him out and also a little gentle gossip with certain interested parties helps spread the notion around of Rogers as human and approachable. 

Rogers’ new running buddy is a surprise to everyone, but in retrospect it shouldn’t really be. Wilson is warm, funny and perceptive, more importantly he is nothing to do with SHIELD, which makes him ideal friend material. An ex-soldier who works at the VA – she only looks into him enough to establish he’s not a plant, enough to reassure herself that he’s a really competent counsellor not a spy – and sees Rogers as a fellow combat and grief damaged soldier in need of a friend. All things considered, she’d have been amazed if Rogers hadn’t had some form of combat stress related condition, if not full-blown PTSD. He’s been doing better since New York, but she knows full well that better is a journey not a destination. She still kicks herself though, once again it is grief that gets her, the alien thing she can’t touch, can’t help her teammate through. Natasha is magnanimous though, she can cede this one to Wilson, let him help Rogers in ways she can’t. 

Fury lies. It’s the first thing most people who work with him learn, and the one thing that they remember most about him. They forget though, that Natasha lies too. They can lie to each other, and have it be more honest than telling the truth could ever be. Natasha’s always valued that about him, grown to depend on it more than she would ever admit to herself, let alone to him. Fury is dead and she is every bit as adrift as Barton was after they lost Coulson. She doesn’t know how to fix that for herself anymore than she could help him. She can avenge him though, Rogers might not trust her – that’s ok, she doesn’t trust him either – but he does need her to help him find the truth and wants it just as much as she does. He needs something more from her but she can’t figure it out, even after he tells her – how about a friend – it takes her a long time to accept that and understand it. Her life has turned into a buddy-cop movie with international terrorists, but she’s started to find his presence soothing. She wants to call Barton and ask, “Is this what making friends feels like?” because he’d mock her, but he’d be proud of her too. But she can’t because the number of people who she can trust aren’t actually trying to kill her is down to two and if he’s a traitor it will endanger them, and if he’s not then it will endanger him. 

Wilson is a potentially useful ally. He has no stake in this game – well, beyond being against neo-Nazis infiltrating his country’s government and international intelligence agencies, but Natasha considers that common human decency - but his loyalty to Rogers makes him step up. He trusts her only in as much as he knows that Rogers does, which seems sensible as she’s in the same boat. Once they’ve seen each other in action there’s definitely a mutual respect club going on. Though she can tell that he doesn’t quite know what to make of her, something she would normally encourage, but she’s not entirely sure what to make of him either. Natasha does, however, really want a go on his wings. Though she does despair a little, that somehow she’s teamed up with yet another boy with a tendency to throw himself off high places without a parachute. He opens his home to them, lets them make his kitchen their base of operations and cover his living room in plans, schematics and dubiously obtained manilla folders. He’s also suitably appalled by Latino neo-Nazis.

“That’s all kinds of fucked up,” is how he rather succinctly puts it. 

It is, though she’s seen weirder. But with the evidence increasingly pointing to Sitwell being HYRDRA it's all coming a bit too close to home. He was Coulson’s protégé, does that mean her handler was HYDRA too? That Barton is? Surely they’d just have tried to straight up recruit her to HYDRA though? She’d been a mercenary back then, they didn’t know anything about her motivations. Unless they’d gone over later, they of all people would know that her loyalty was more to Fury than to SHIELD itself. She pulls herself back into the present by focusing on the back and forth between Wilson and a newly returned Rogers, about the necessity of swearing.

“I once had to infiltrate a group of Jewish neo-Nazis,” she offers, “which is a whole other level of cultural self-hatred. Rarely have I felt less regret shooting someone in the head.”

Rogers is quiet for a long moment before he speaks, “You know that discussion we had a couple of months ago? About American exceptionalism, the failure of our education system to teach kids their own history and the impact of that given our place on the world stage?”

“Yes,” Natasha agrees cautiously, unsure where this conversation is going.

“I take it all back, you were right. Both of you are. This is all kinds of fucked up,” he concludes, sitting down heavily on the sofa across from them. 

Wilson snorts derisively, “Yeah, I don’t know much about spies, but I’m gonna bet that being right is not particularly comforting to her right now.”

She gets up from her spot and moves to seat herself on the floor in front of Rogers' feet. For that she can grant him a concession of her own. 

“It’s a hollow victory,” she tells them honestly, leaning her head against his knee. His hand comes down to cautiously stroke her hair and she allows it, allows herself to be comforted and anchored by it. To have faith, not in Captain America, but in the ridiculous, self-righteous, incorruptibility of Steve Rogers. The three of them fall silent as they all try to avoid thinking about how deep the rot might go. 

~

Sometimes she forgets that there are other reactions among SHIELD staff to Captain America than adoring admiration and indulgent loyalty. Sitwell’s face is distorted by disdain and distaste as he mocks Rogers’ innate good nature on the rooftop. (How he stomached being Coulson’s friend so long baffles her.) He’s right to an extent; Rogers’ never would have thrown Sitwell off the roof. He hates bullies, so threatening people, even for the right reasons, sits uneasily with him, which is fine by her, he wouldn’t be himself otherwise. But he is a pragmatist as well as an idealist, so he can step back and let her do what he can’t. Sitwell isn’t her colleague anymore, isn’t someone whose field calls she trusts, someone whose jokes make her smile, not anymore. He’s just another neo-Nazi and she could push them off roofs all day. She can feel Rogers’ satisfaction as Wilson swoops up to join them, a babbling and pleading Sitwell in his grip. This is going to work, this team of the three of them, if they go down it will be no fault of their own, but she doesn’t think for a moment they will. 

That doesn’t make her any less relieved when Hill does her short Stormtrooper act and brings them in. Fury is alive though, and they’re having words when this is over, because she came dangerously close to having an emotion back there in the hospital. 

She hears the words time and again during and after the Treskillion’s fall. Whenever a SHIELD agent (a proper one, not a HYDRA double-agent) stumbles or doubts, two words seem to steady them and pull them together: Captain’s Orders. Everything they’ve worked and fought for, everything they’ve believed in has literally come crashing down around their ears. They need something to hold on to as they destroy their own organisation, and Captain America is both of SHIELD and apart from it. Something outside of themselves to believe in. They’d do anything for him, follow him anywhere, and while Captain America appreciates that, Natasha suspects that she’s the only one who sees how much that scares Steve Rogers. 

The two of them make a good team, each doing what the other can’t. So she steps out of the shadows and stands up, testifying on the Hill to what they’ve done. She asks them to accept the truth of what she says, not out of faith in some icon or legend, but based on the evidence of what she has seen and done. She’s a spy and an ex-Russian defector, she’s done some horrendous things for her employers – both before and during her time with SHIELD – and while everything in her rebels at being so exposed, they need to hear her testimony. They need to see the price of their precious freedom; they need to understand that their fear produces people like her, like SHIELD, like HYDRA, like the World Security Council. The system is rotten and they need to see the truth of it, to stop judging the likes of her and make decisions on what they are and are not willing to sacrifice for freedom with their eyes open. Every time she doubts, every time she wants to walk away and leave these politicians to mouth their platitudes and hypocrisies, she reminds herself that she is a person with choices choosing to do this to defend other people. Recites it silently like a mantra. Steve, she thinks, Sam, Nick, Maria, Sharon, Clint, Melinda, Tony, Pepper, Bruce, Jane. Just threats to be eliminated on a list to HYRDRA, but people to her. People she works with, that make her laugh or drive her up the wall, that have saved her life or helped her save the world, protected her or been protected by her. People that might be her friends if she let them. Hundreds and thousands of people she’ll never know the names of, all of them people with hopes and dreams, failings and doubts, all of them with friends. 

Steve doesn’t need her to follow his lead and his orders unquestioningly, he needs her to question him and challenge him. He needs her to be the kind of friend who calls him on his bullshit and follows him because his arguments are sound, not out of blind faith. She can do that. Increasingly though, it doesn’t feel like a role that she’s playing, it feels natural and true, and perhaps that is as much a victory as uncovering HYDRA double agents.


End file.
